Technology for businesses has become somewhat of an arms race. The fact is, entrepreneurs need to use their digital transformation strategies as a weapon for growth. If businesses can acquire and gain access to the right tools, they have a fighting chance in the competitive world.

One of the issues facing businesses now is how to get your hands on the right technology and put it into effective use. Those digital trends transforming the economy right now are integral to business strategy for entrepreneurs, and it’s time to unlock them for the fate and future of your success as an entrepreneur.

The Digital Transformation Battle

The digital trends of the last two decades have pushed businesses into new territory, and keeping up with those changes is the only way to thrive in this new environment. Digital trends are not just fads that disappear with the times, but new normals that need to be adopted and integrated as rapidly as possible.

For companies following these trends, a complete understanding of them is the first step. Here are the essential digital trends for businesses to know about today.

Search and Assistants

Your life is drastically different than it was 20 years ago, in large part due to the technologies and digital trends reshaping the world and businesses. The intelligence of software and programs used by billions of people influences the way we live.

How we look for information and products and how we do business has all changed as a result. One of the most powerful tools is technology as a partner/assistant. Digital assistants are becoming more useful and more powerful. As this technology continues to improve, it will play a larger role in business, assisting us with the tasks that can be automated or done regularly, resulting in increased efficiency and freeing you up for the creative and strategic tasks on your plate.

Search

With the sheer amount of information online, it can be difficult to get your company in front of the right people, especially when the competition is trying to do the exact same thing. Search results often yield millions of hits, and businesses need to get their brand in front of them as effectively as possible.

Thanks to SEO and search practices designed for businesses, your company can get in front of the right people at the right time and boost your search effectiveness. Beyond Google Searches, recommendations by AI assistants have become the trend to observe.

Companies that want to maintain their edge should be able to get organic traffic without paid advertising campaigns through website optimization for voice searches conducted using increasingly-ubiquitous voice search assistants.

Customers finding your business are one of the primary targets of advertisers, but when you search for the tools you need, you should also have the best tools at your disposal. Unlocking the power of search for your own business will mean finding better suppliers and business partners now and in the future.

Assistants

Remember the days when you had someone to do all of your scheduling and taking notes for your phone calls? AI assistants now do the same thing without being paid a cent. This trend has accelerated as machine learning allows assistants to get better at doing their jobs, and they become adept at handling more complex tasks to your specifications.

The more you work with an AI assistant, the more it learns about you, and the better it gets at doing what you need it to do. On top of that, it is always learning and continues to think while you aren’t. You are less likely to forget or miss important details with an AI assistant watching your back.

Once you use it enough and the assistant has the time to learn your schedule, routines, and habits, it will also start using predictive algorithms to figure out what you might be doing next. Do you go to the same lunch spot every day and call each time for a reservation? Your AI assistant will do that for you without needing to be prompted once it recognizes that you’ve made the call at similar times for similar reasons.

Internet of Things

Also known as IoT, the Internet of Things is one of the leading trends in technology and innovation for businesses to unlock. It started with simple tasks and products that could control the lights in your home. Networked appliances were the logical next step. Although consumer appliances for the home are popular, businesses can use IoT with manufacturing, supply chain management, and logistics to change the game for entrepreneurs.

Manufacturing

Linking your machinery to coordinate, so your employees don’t have to, will save so much time, you’ll wonder why you didn’t switch sooner. This trend is not going away, and while some human input is often needed for manufacturing processes, as robots get smarter and more capable, linking them via IoT means they can communicate and coordinate their work from start to finish on an assembly line.

Like project management software that passes the task on to the next person in the chain when it is ready, IoT-enabled factories will pass the product on to the next step on the line when it is ready for it. On a broader scale, the factory can pass the project on to the business’ shipping and supply chain side when it is ready. IoT is enabling seamless transitions between every aspect of your business.

Supply Chain Management

Whether you make the products or just ship them, you can manage your supply chain automatically as well. As a more established trend, networked supply chains use AI and IoT to connect every contact point of the chain and coordinate shipping and timing.

This, paired with the networked factory producing your products, gives you an incredible edge over your competitors and lets you take on the biggest operations with fewer resources or scale.

Logistics

Managing a global logistics business can be complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Getting shipments to their destinations is increasingly automated for businesses of all sizes through IoT.

Networked warehouses can communicate with locations and customers to update them automatically when their order has passed to the next phase of the process and is on its way.

For your trucks, planes, or ships to get there, they only need to be connected via IoT for you to track every mile of their progress and ensure the swift delivery of orders from origin to destination.

Remote Working and Video Conferencing

While it seems like a given in a world that is working remotely, video conferencing and collaboration is by far one of the biggest digital trends unlocking growth for entrepreneurs around the world. Now, you and your workers can be anywhere, any time, and for free.

Instead of traveling for meetings, you can have them right from your home office.

Instead of needing to work in the same conference room for hours, employees can collaborate on documents and projects from wherever they might be, free of cost. You can check in on project progress and find out what the next steps might be in order.

Remote working also means different company structures, and with the rise of entirely distributed workforces, entrepreneurs can use this digital trend to unlock growth by reducing office costs and employee costs while broadening their candidate base.

Communication and Collaboration

Being able to communicate with a workforce that spans hundreds or thousands of employees instantly wherever you might be is a godsend for the bottom lines of thousands of businesses. Entrepreneurs have cut travel expenses almost completely and are increasing their profit margin as a result.

Collaborating on documents and projects remotely and through collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams or Google Docs allows employees to work together from every corner of the globe. No more waiting for the email with the document to bounce around to everyone before it can be reviewed. You can check in on progress live and see changes being made in real-time.

Distributed Workforces

By opening your candidate pool to the global workforce, you have more options than ever. Hiring is not restricted to the city you operate in or even the country. As long as the timezone is not prohibitive, you can hire someone on the other side of the world for the salary that works for you.

Having access to the global candidate pool means that you have more to choose from, and therefore you can be more selective. Instead of hiring average workers from a small pool, you can put the call out wide and far for the best talent, and the world will respond.

Costs are down, and profits are up with digitally distributed workforces. As a result, this digital trend is here to stay. There has been a lot of talk recently about when a return to the office is in order, but a return is not necessary for many companies. They are seeing that the benefits are numerous and impossible to ignore, and they don’t want to go back to the old way of doing things.

The Old Ways Are Dead

Your company’s digital transformation has likely already started, but there may still be many doors to unlock that are keeping the digital trends of your company’s future out of reach. If you can tap into these powerful tools and put them into action immediately, you’ll never go back.